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Combo Meal Profitability Tool

Determine if your combo meals are a profitable strategy by comparing their margins against selling items individually.

/ 01

Drive Higher Ticket Sales

Encourage customers to upgrade from single items to a full meal, instantly increasing average transaction value.

/ 02

Engineer for Profit

Strategically bundle high-margin items like drinks with popular entrees to maximize overall profitability.

/ 03

Speed Up Ordering

Simplify the decision-making process for customers, leading to faster order times and increased throughput.

The calculator

Run the numbers

Combo Meal Profitability
Results

Enter values and click Calculate to see results

The theory

Understanding Combo Meal Profitability.

Combo meals are a classic QSR strategy to increase the average check size. However, the discount offered can eat into your margins. This tool helps you quantify the profitability of a combo compared to selling the items separately.

/ Formula

The key is to ensure the increase in sales volume from the combo deal outweighs the profit lost from the discount.

Combo Profit Margin = ((Combo Price - Total Individual Cost) / Combo Price) × 100
/ Industry standard

Fountain drinks have extremely high profit margins (often 90% or more). Including a high-margin drink in the combo helps offset the lower margins on the food items, making the overall combo more profitable.

Questions, answered

Frequently asked questions.

Fountain drinks have extremely high profit margins (often 90% or more). Including a high-margin drink in the combo helps offset the lower margins on the food items, making the overall combo more profitable.
Upselling is encouraging a customer to spend more than they originally intended. For combo meals, this often means asking 'Would you like to make that a large for just 50 cents more?'. The incremental cost of a larger drink or fries is minimal, so most of that extra 50 cents is pure profit.
It can be a powerful strategy. Bundling a popular, high-demand item (your 'Star') with a high-margin item (like a drink or a new side) can increase the sales of the high-margin item. The perceived value of the deal is high because of the popular entrée.
You need an accurate recipe cost for each item in the combo. This involves summing up the cost of every single ingredient (e.g., bun, patty, cheese, lettuce, sauce for a burger), as well as the cost of the fries and the drink syrup/cup/lid/straw. A detailed Recipe Costing Calculator is best for this.
It's a balance. A combo with a 75% margin that only sells 10 times a day is less profitable overall than a combo with a 65% margin that sells 100 times a day. The goal of a combo is often to drive volume, so accepting a slightly lower margin to dramatically increase total units sold is a common and effective strategy.
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